Busy creative period

Posted: Saturday, March 30, 2002

Ron DickerSpecial to the Hartford Courant

PARK CITY, Utah - Fresh off a day of skiing, Robin Williams plunged into a free-association downhill during a recent interview. Then questions came up, and he cut sharply to the answers as if he were in a slalom.

Williams is in a busy creative period, having benched the goofy-Gus persona from films such as "Patch Adams" and "What Dreams May Come." Besides his stand-up comedy tour, he has three new movies coming out that show a more sinister side.

"Par-tay," Williams gushed as he sashayed into a back-alley office that was so cold, you could almost see his breath. Fueled partly by a string of appearances at the Sundance Film Festival, the soon-to-be 50-year-old comedian also was riding the energy of change. (His birthday is in July.)

For every riff about, say, Stephen Hawking's bawdy birthday party ("he had a laptop dancer"), Williams offered morsels on his busy 2002. He is performing live shtick on the road for the first time in 15 years, partly because of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It's a lot of talking about that," he said. "Wet burka contests. It's a full gamut, what we've been through, the security measures. It's freeing performing stand-up. Comedy in movies is the toughest of all."

His cinematic makeover, however, jumps far beyond punch lines and pratfalls. "Death to Smoochy," opening Friday, is the first of three upcoming films in which he plays a possible killer. Williams calls "Death to Smoochy" a "kick-out nasty comedy," so his portrayal of a fired host of a children's show who seeks revenge on his replacement, a Barney-like rhino named Smoochy (Edward Norton), is not such a departure.

But Williams gets many shades darker in "Insomnia," opening May 24. He plays a psychotic murder suspect tracked by Al Pacino's cop in a small Alaskan town.

"Mr. Method Meets Wild Boy," Williams said.

The topper is the upcoming "One Hour Photo." As a photo processing clerk who takes way too much interest in his customers, Williams is a polyester-wearing nebbish who roils on the inside. His performance may throw his fans.

"People won't ask for autographs so much," he said. "That'd be great."

"I didn't have qualms about his ability as an actor," he said, referring to Williams' Juilliard training. "My concern was: Can you take one of the biggest stars in the world and turn him into a small, bland man?"

The comic was coasting on a run of icky-sweet do-gooder roles. Even with the box-office success of "Patch Adams" (1998), about a clowning doctor, Williams did some soul-searching. "I'm just trying to get different colors going," he said. "I did a lot of movies that were similar on that level."

Williams has essayed darker roles before, such as a terrorist bomber in 1996's "The Secret Agent." But they have been overshadowed by a manic image that took root with the '70s sitcom "Mork & Mindy."

"The guy was running out of challenges," Romanek said. "He just found something that turned him on."

Although many directors let him run with the material, Williams' favorite parts are more self-contained: the professor in "Dead Poets Society" (1989) and the shy researcher in "Awakenings" (1990).

He did not have a film project in the works, but at Sundance, he was gathering plenty of material for the stand-up tour ahead. Of the fur-wearing Hollywood types who sauntered along Main Street, he said, "I saw a couple wearing the entire food chain."

This time, Williams said, he would hit the road with no cocaine to fuel the journey. (His favorite saying about his past drug addition is: "Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money.") He trained for the grind the old-fashioned way: cycling by day and polishing his routine by night at clubs near his home in San Francisco.

"It's a bit like being in Switzerland during a nuclear war," said Williams, who lives with his second wife, Marsha Garces Williams, and their two children. "The business is kind of at a distance. I can make raids, go to L.A., but I'm not surrounded by the constant 'How am I doing?' "